Upper Division Course Offerings
Fall 2012
ETS 310-4 Literary Periods: The American Renaissance ETS 315-6 Ethnic Literatures and Cultures: Yiddish Literature in Translation ETS 320-4 Authors: Philip Roth ETS 340-1 Theorizing Forms and Genres: Cinema and the Documentary Idea ETS 340-2 Theorizing Forms and Genres: Time Across Media ETS 340-3 Theorizing Forms and Genres: Latino Autobiography ETS 401-2 Advanced Writing Workshop: Poetry The course will emphasize a weekly writing and reading assignment. A variety of twentieth- and twenty-first-century poets will be examined, as well as weekly discussion of at least half the student work turned in for any given week. Your grade will be based on the quality of your participation in class discussion and insights into the reading material, as well as the quality or vibrancy your own poetry writing over the course of the semester. Issues for writing prompts and writing assignments will be frequent and will sometimes vary for different students. Attendance at two to three poetry readings during the semester will be required. ETS 403-2 Advanced Writing Workshop: Fiction ETS 405-3 Topics in Medicine & Culture: First Person: Narratives of Illness, Disability, and Identity Pre-1900 Course ETS 410-2 Forms and Genres: 20th Century American Poetry ETS 410-4 Forms and Genres: The Middle East in Graphic Novels ETS 410-5 Forms and Genres:"What's Love Got to Do with It?" --Medieval Romance D.H. Green, The Beginnings of Medieval Romance: Fact and Fiction, 1150-1220. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature No. 47 Roberta L. Krueger, The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance ETS 420-2 Cultural Production and Reception: American Icons ETS 420-4 Cultural Production and Reception: The Bloody Argument ETS 440-1 Theorizing History and Culture: Politics and Poetics of the Common
ETS 304-1 Reading and Writing Poetry
TuTh 9:30-10:50
Instructor: Sarah Harwell
T. S. Eliot said that minor poets borrow while great poets steal. From classical antiquity to the present, poets have always learned their trade by imitating other poets. They have always pursued their individual talent by absorbing, assimilating, and in some cases subverting the lessons of the traditions they inherit. In this class, we will read and imitate poems from well-known poets. We’ll examine each poet closely, sympathetically, and predatorily. That is, we’ll read like aspiring writers, looking for what we can steal. We’ll deepen our understanding of a variety of poetic devices, such as diction, image, music, and metaphor. We’ll attend to each poet’s stylistic and formal idiosyncrasies, their techniques and habits, and then write poems that show who we’ve read and how well we’ve read them. You will be required to display an understanding of these issues by producing creative and analytical responses to the work studied.
ETS 305-2 Critical Analysis: Marxist Ideology Critique
MW 2:15-3:35
Instructor: Donald Morton
An inquiry into Marxist social theory seems especially appropriate in light of the today’s global economic crisis, a crisis that has led to the recent publication of books with such titles as: A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of '08 and the Descent into Depression (Richard A. Posner); The Trouble With Capitalism: An Enquiry into the Causes of Global Economic Failure (Harry Shutt); The Failure of Risk Management: Why It's Broken and How to Fix It (Douglas W. Hubbard); and The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street (Justin Fox). Perhaps most dramatic is the title of Michael Lewitt’s recent book, The Death of Capital. Such writings show how historical events (the economic collapse of 2008) have led more thinkers to question the gospel of the free market capitalism. It is Marxism that provides the strongest possible critique of capitalism. The course opens with an investigation of ideology understood in a broad and general sense; the second section focuses specifically on Marxism and Marxist ideology critique; and the final section investigates the “new” understanding of ideology developed under the influence of post-structuralism and postmodernism.
ETS 305-3 Critical Analysis: Theories of the Novel
TuTh 9:30-10:50
Instructor:Erin Mackie
Starting from the premise that the novel is, in the words of Michael McKeon, "the quintessentially modern genre," this class will study some of the ways that twentieth-century scholars have thought about the novel and its relation to modernity as a historical epoch. Our study will take us from the origins of the English novel in the eighteenth century through its postcolonial forms in the late twentieth century. When and why did the novel originate? How is the novel distinct from other modes of fictional narrative? How has the genre, novel, changed with cultural-historical shifts? Alongside representative theorists of the novel we will read representative novels from the eighteenth through the twentieth century.
ETS 310-2 Literary Periods: US Modernism
MW 2:15-3:35
Instructor: Susan Edmunds
This course offers an introduction to US modernist fiction. Critics have defined modernism as an international movement that arose in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century that rejected earlier norms of literary and aesthetic representation. Some modernists write stories that are cut up, rearranged and hard to follow. Some make mental consciousness rather than external reality the focus of narrative investigation. Some reject the rules of grammar and syntax, and make sentences that don’t work like sentences.
We will examine why modernist writers in the US rejected earlier literary norms, and how they sought to identify new ways of representing the world that might also help them change it. We will read fiction from a variety of modernist movements in the context of debates of the period over increasing immigration, urbanization, and industrialization; growing class conflict; the rapid expansion of a consumer-oriented society; African Americans’ “great migration” to the North and new models of anti-racist activism; and contestations over women’s social place and the rise of the “New Woman.”
ETS 310-3 Literary Periods: Eighteenth-Century Worlds
TuTh 12:30-1:50
Instructor: Erin Mackie
This course investigates some of the crucial cultural sites of the British eighteenth century: metropolis and colony; country and city; the nation; private and public; the imagination; and the market. Paying attention to formulations of class and status, taste and decorum, gender, nationality, and ethnicity, we will look at how modern notions of difference, cohesion, legitimacy, and cultural aesthetic value were formed. We will end the course looking at the contemporary reconstruction of an eighteenth-century world in Williamsburg, Virginia. Authors we will read include: John Dryden; John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester; Aphra Behn; George Etherege; Jonathan Swift; Daniel Defoe; Alexander Pope; Joseph Addison; Richard Steele; John Gay; and Samuel Johnson.
Pre-1900 Course
MW 2:15-3:35
Instructor: Patricia Roylance
By any measure, the early 1850s were tremendously fertile years for US literary production. This “American Renaissance” produced famous novels (like Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin), short stories (like Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno”), orations (like addresses on the institution of slavery by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and Henry David Thoreau) and long poems (like Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha). We will be analyzing these seminal texts, and also studying the social, political, and cultural events of this period and how they influence its literature. As academic trends have shifted, critical interest in this period has moved from “classic” literature by white men to, for example, popular bestsellers written by women authors and abolitionist texts by people of color. We will study the immense symbolic value of this period as a battleground on which these kinds of shifts in critical priorities are negotiated.
Pre-1900 Course
ETS 315-4 Ethnic Literatures and Cultures: The Holocaust in American Literature
TuTh 2:00-3:20
Instructor: Harvey Teres
This course will explore the moral, religious, and artistic challenges faced by American writers who have represented the Holocaust and its aftermath in fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. Students will begin by reading a historical account of the Holocaust, and several perspectives on the effects of the Holocaust on American life, especially among American Jews. We will spend the rest of the semester reading literary representations of the Holocaust and its aftermath. Texts will likely include Philip Roth’s “Eli, the Fanatic” and The Ghost Writer; Bernard Malamud’s “The Last Mohican” and “Lady of the Lake”; Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird, Cynthia Ozick’s “The Pagan Rabbi,” “The Shawl,” and “Rosa”; Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated; Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem; Art Spiegelman’s Maus I and Maus II; Michael Chabon’s The Final Solution; Nathan Englander’s “The Tumblers”; and selected poetry by Jacob Glatstein, Charles Reznikoff, W.D. Snodgrass, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Anne Sexton, Anthony Hecht, Elie Wiesel, and others.
TuTh 12:30-1:50
Instructor: Sarah Barkin
This course will provide a survey of major works in modern Yiddish fiction and drama. Our readings focus on four areas: 1) the three classic Yiddish authors: S. Y. Abramovitsh, Sholem Aleichem, and I. L. Peretz; 2) Yiddish drama by Gordin and Ansky; 3) modernist trends in Yiddish: Lamed Shapiro and David Bergelson; and 4) Yiddish women writers: Schtok, Schulner, Serdatsky, Dropkin, Lempel, and Raskin. While placing each author’s work in historical and biographical context, we will pay special attention to the role of satire, parody, narrative techniques, and figures of speech.
TuTh 11:00-12:20
Instructor: Harvey Teres
In this course we will read many of the major novels and short stories of Philip Roth, one of America’s most controversial yet highly decorated contemporary writers. On the one hand accused of being a “self-hating Jew” and an inveterate sexist, on the other a perennial candidate for the Nobel Prize in literature and lauded as a courageous truth-teller, Roth usually evokes a strong response from readers one way or another. This course will invite you to respond as you see fit as we consider Roth’s achievements as an artist and observer of post-WWII American life. A good number of the following texts will likely be included: Goodbye, Columbus; Portnoy’s Complaint; The Breast; Reading Myself and Others; The Facts; Zuckerman Bound (A Trilogy); Sabbath’s Theater; Operation Shylock; American Pastoral; The Human Stain; The Plot Against America; I Married a Communist; Indignation; Everyman; Exit Ghost; and Nemesis. Along the way we will read interpretations of Roth’s fiction by several scholars and critics, including portions of Ross Posnock’s Philip Roth’s Rude Truths.
ETS 320-6 Authors: James Joyce
Tu Th 12:30-1:50
Instructor: Chris Forster
The career of James Joyce captures many of the key developments of twentieth-century literature. In this class we will read three of Joyce’s four “major” works. We’ll begin with his collection of stories, Dubliners, and his novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. At the heart of this course will be a slow, careful reading of Ulysses, a novel some have called the “greatest novel of the twentieth century.” We’ll end the semester by looking briefly at selections from Joyce’s final work, Finnegans Wake. Alongside Joyce’s novels we’ll also consider some of the most significant criticism of Joyce’s work, both from contemporaries (including writers like T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf) as well as more recent criticism. Class assignments will include regular short written responses, two major essays, and a presentation to the class.
ETS 325-2 Histories and Varieties of English
TuTh 2:00-3:20
Instructor: Patrica Moody
This course aims to provide students with as much knowledge as possible, as interactively as possible, of the basic structures of the English language and representations of its history. Equally important, the course aims to develop critical awareness of contemporary language issues and the complex ways in which language embeds attitudes.
ETS 330-1 Theorizing Meaning and Interpretation: The Culture of Addiction
MW 9:30-10:50
Instructor: Donald Morton
This course investigates a current trend in dominant cultural and literary theory which raises to a new level the oft-heard cliché: “we live in a sick society.” This trend rejects the notion that society is basically a rational space governed by shared (common) concepts (“liberty, equality, the pursuit of happiness”). According to this view, society is no longer even the more “neutral”-sounding space of discourse, representation, and signification. Instead, culture is now the much darker zone of inescapable pathology. The literary and cultural theorists who promote this view are following, among other influences, the ideas of the philosopher Friedrich Schelling, who defines human nature not in terms of our capacity for reason or work or some other more familiar characteristic, but in terms of addiction. Schelling conceptualizes the subject (the human person) as the subject of “Eigensucht” (“addictive creatureliness”). This course will investigate the linked cycle of social, cultural, and literary issues surrounding addiction, drugs, the therapy culture, and the war on drugs by reading a variety of cultural texts: history, fiction, documentaries, theory. . . It will address the basic question: what social, political, economic, . . . interests are served by teaching citizens to accept the “invitation to infirmity,” that is, to think of themselves and all members of society as inescapably “sick“?
MW 12:45-2:05
Film Screening W 7:00-9:50
Instructor: Roger Hallas
Invented at end of the nineteenth century, cinema was inevitably shaped by industrial modernity’s demand for rational, scientific evidence and its technological need for media that could potentially archive the world. Cinema has continued to be regarded in various ways as a powerful medium for documenting the world, for capturing the “real” in all its diversity. This course investigates the complex history and theorization of the documentary idea across various film and video practices. We shall examine not only classic and contemporary documentary films, but also experimental cinema, essay films, fake documentaries, and docudrama. We shall interrogate the very term “documentary” which has a long and contested history that traverses scientific, legal, aesthetic, political, sociological, and ethnographic discourses. Moving from the euphoria and anxiety around the first public film screenings by the Lumière Brothers in 1895 through the radical defamiliarization of the world in 1920s Soviet film and 1960s political cinema to contemporary “first-person” documentaries that bear witness to historical trauma, the course explores the relations between film and video practices from (often radically) different national, historical and political contexts. MEETS WITH HUM 300 M002. The weekly screenings scheduled for this course are required.
Film and Screen Studies Course
MW 3:45-5:05
Film Screening M 7:00-9:50
Instructor: Chris Hanson
This course will explore representations and uses of time across multiple media, focusing in particular on artistic and industrial practices, technological developments, and theories about temporality. Media texts, forms, and related technologies examined in the course will include mainstream and experimental film and video, television, interactive media, and video games. We will closely study media objects which reference their own temporality or reconfigure time using formal methods such as repetition and narrative structures built around time travel. The role of medium specificity in both the representation of time and our experiential understanding of temporality will be considered, as well as the cultural and social significance of historical shifts in notions of time. Texts and technologies to be examined will include Life of an American Fireman (1903), Ballet Mécanique (1924), Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), A Movie (1958), Koyaanisqatsi (1982), Groundhog Day (1993), Memento (2000), Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2003), Decasia (2004), Lost (2004-2010), time-shifting on television (i.e. VCRs and TiVos), Braid (2008), and YouTube. The weekly screenings scheduled for this course are required.
Film and Screen Studies Course
TuTh 9:30-10:50
Instructor: Silvio Torres-Saillant
This course focuses on life writing by US authors of Hispanic descent, thus introducing students to the study of a literary genre (the autobiography) in relation to an ethnicity (Hispanic/Latino). In taking a close look at key Latino texts that set out to narrate the self, the course will take up the question of Latino identity as a topic to be investigated, the difficulty that the project of narrating the self poses, the socio-political background that frames the current popularity of autobiography, and the critical problem that any representation of the self entails. The course asks what happens to our reading of a Latino autobiography when we acknowledge the epistemological instability of both the ethnicity and the genre therein named. The course also calls attention to the levels of complication that obtain when the “genre” is practiced by writers who, by virtue of their “ethnicity” and the location of their “community” in the social system, perceive themselves as marginal in relation to the national corpus of literary texts. The now classical formulations about the form will be brought into conversation with contemporary voices that have influentially pronounced themselves on the subject.
W 12:45-3:30
Instructor: Michael Burkard
The maximum enrollment for this course is 15. Anyone interested in taking the course must submit 1) hard copy of five pages of your own original poetry; 2) hard copy of a 50-100 word statement of your interest in such a course; 3) hard copy of a list of 25 writers / artists / musicians whose work you are currently interested in or whose work has influenced your own writing to a greater or lesser extent. This hard copy is to be left in a secure envelope in my mailbox in HL 401 during the registration period. Include your email address and I will contact you about whether you are admitted to the course or not.
Tu 12:30-3:15
Instructor: Arthur Flowers
Advanced Fiction Workshop. Workshop format. Fiction sample required, ten pages or less in hard copy to my mailbox in 401 HL.
W 4:00-7:00
Instructor: Deirdre Neilen
Contemporary culture in the United States appears to worship youth and do all it can to deny or at least delay aging for as long as possible. Consequently, many of us have difficulty both facing our own mortality and handling the serious illnesses of those we love. This course will examine American attitudes and responses toward the end of life through fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and film. Literature allows us to analyze our own attitudes and philosophies more objectively than we might otherwise do. This course will introduce the ethical issues that arise with end of life care particularly from the perspective of physicians, nurses, and other health care professionals. This class is held in Room 1508 Setnor Academic Building - SUNY Upstate Medical Center.
Tu 4:15-7:15
Instructor: Rebecca Garden
This course explores first person narratives of illness and disability, especially in light of other forms of social difference, such as gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and class. Using tools of literary analysis and cultural criticism, students come together from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds to examine the experiences of writers with AIDS, autism, cancer, hepatitis, and multiple sclerosis. Students consider ethical and social issues such as doctor/patient relationships, caregiver relations, questions of control, authority, appearance and “normalcy,” and the role of empathy and emotion in medicine and healing. This class is held in SUNY Upstate Medical Center.
TuTh 11:00-12:20
Instructor: Stephanie Shirilan
We live in a world where the imagination has been rhetorically demoted to signify the infantile or merely unreal—a world, that is, where “Imagineers” work for Disney. But this was not always the case. In early modern Europe, the imagination was deemed capable of extraordinary transformations: mothers imprinted fetuses with their thoughts and desires; preachers lit upon conceits that could literally break hardened hearts; healers cured and actors infected by transmitting and transfiguring spirits. In addition to contextual readings on early modern science, philosophy, and theology, we will read widely from literature classified as early modern romance (Spenser’s Faerie Queen and Sidney’s Arcadia), utopian fiction (More’s Utopia, Hall’s Mundus Alter et Idem), travel narrative (Behn’s Oroonoko, Neville’s Isle of Pines) and proto science “fiction” (Kepler’s Somnium, Godwin’s Man in the Moone) in order to consider how historiographies of genre have militated against richer understanding of the powers of the imagination in early modern fantasy.
TuTh 3:30-4:50
Instructor: David Yaffe
“The self is a cloister full of remembered sounds,” wrote Wallace Stevens. Twentieth-century American poetry is filled with sounds—along with visions and voices, meanings and interpretations, decisions and revisions—well worth remembering and rediscovering all over again. This course will favor depth over breadth, giving these poets the time and thought they deserve. Poets on the syllabus could include Stevens, T.S. Eliot, Hart Crane, Langston Hughes, Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery, and Anne Carson. We will also question whether the lyrics of Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, and Leonard Cohen can be considered as a kind of poetry. Poets not represented on the syllabus will be included in presentations, at the discretion of the instructor. After a semester of reading these poets, you will, to paraphrase Stevens, discover yourselves more truly and more strange.
MW 12:45-2:05
Instructor: Carol Fadda-Conrey
This course focuses on a selection of graphic novels that handle some of the complex issues defining life in the Middle East during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including the traumas of war and conflict, coming-of-age struggles, gender relations, and the day-to-day effects of social, religious, class, and political confluences. We will start by studying some of the major tenets of the graphic novel form by reading introductory works by Scott McCloud and Will Eisner that define the parameters of this genre, and will then move on to closely analyze graphic novels that feature countries like Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Iran, and Egypt. The selection of texts includes Ari Folman and David Polonsky’s Waltz with Bashir, Joe Sacco’s Palestine, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Lamia Ziade’s Bye Bye Babylon: Beirut 1975-1979, and Toufic El Rassi’s Arab in America, among others. In addition to the delineation of these works’ thematic foci, we will also study the development of the graphic novel as an emerging form in Middle Eastern literary and cultural circles, thus tracing its production, circulation, and reception within as well as outside the Middle East.
TuTh 11:00-12:20
Instructor: Patricia Moody
Arguably the most influential and also the most enduring genre to emerge from the European Middle Ages, romance’s evolving development is one of translation and transformation, adaptation and refashioning, and fertile intertextual and intercultural exchange among the linguistic and political entities of medieval Europe. (Krueger). Before the twelfth century, western vernacular writings dealt almost exclusively with religious, historical, and factual themes, all of which were held to convey the truth. During the second half of the twelfth century, however, a new genre emerged: the romance, which was consciously conceived as fictional and therefore allowed largely to break free from traditional presuppositions. Medieval romances astound the modern reader—first, by their broad circulation throughout Europe; second, by the multitude and variety of stories, characters, themes, and motifs they reveal; and finally, by the sheer diversity of their forms and subject-matter, complexity of narrative strategies and perspectives, and critical responses they invite. (Green) This course offers an examination of medieval fictionality. Beginning with the origins, forms, and contexts of medieval romances, we examine the emergence of romance in its first formative period in the twelfth century, the role of magic and fantasy, and transformations of stories from ancient to modern times. Throughout we consider the difficulties of the genre and the kinds of sociological and cultural issues romance interrogates.
Pre-1900 Course
ETS 410-6 Forms and Genres: The Multi-Plot Victorian Novel
TuTh 11:00-12:20
Instructor: Kevin Morrison
Between 1837 and 1901, over 7,000 novels were published in Britain. This volume makes any attempt at achieving breadth of knowledge about the genre, at best, daunting. Delving into the literature and history of the period, this course will stress intensive rather than extensive reading. We will focus on three rich and complex texts: Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1849), George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–1872), and Walter Besant’s Children of Gibeon (1886). Our thematic concerns will include the public and private spheres; femininity and masculinity; poverty and inequality; as well as marriage and the marriage plot. Formal concerns will include the nature of realism; the relationship of history to literature; novelistic genres; and the length, breadth, and crowdedness of these novels themselves.
Pre-1900 Course
TuTh 12:30-1:50
Instructor: David Yaffe
This course will explore the concept of the icon in American culture. How have certain figures become the subject of scrutiny, obsession, even worship? And how has the idea of the icon been a central theme in American literary texts and in American life? Possible icons may include Walt Whitman (a gay icon and poetic icon), Henry James (an icon of the literary Master), F. Scott Fitzgerald (an icon of the Lost Generation), Miles Davis (an icon of black masculine hip), Allen Ginsberg (a Beat icon), Bob Dylan (an icon of the 60s counterculture, much to his chagrin), Billie Holiday (an icon of the martyred jazz diva), Sylvia Plath (an icon of confessional poetry), and Andy Warhol (our icon of iconography itself). Expect two major papers and a presentation of original research.
TuTh 2:00-3:20
Instructor: Stephanie Shirilan
In the Jacobean revenge play, illicit desire, jealous fury, and boundless ambition culminate in dizzying scenes of death and dismemberment: severed hands, skewered hearts, poisoned skulls, lycanthropy, and accidental suicide. Incest and necrophilia, body-swaps, bartered maidenheads, and all varieties of murder and madness feigned and real are commonplaces of the Jacobean stage. What did violence “do” for the late-Renaissance playgoer? What did it enable playwrights such as Ford, Webster, Middleton, Tourneur, and their audiences to think and say? Considering exigencies of performance, contemporary politics, and dramatic theory, we will debate whether the Jacobean tragedy upholds or subverts the values and virtues of the late Renaissance church and court, carefully weighing the villain’s highly seductive arguments against the blander virtues of the play’s moral authorities.
Pre-1900 Course
TuTh 2:00-3:20
Instructor: Crystal Bartolovich
“Commons” (eg. “global commons,” “creative commons”) is a ubiquitous term in digital, ecological, and political debates, but its historical roots are in an agricultural space that emerged under very different conditions from those that pertain today—conditions that—along with rural commons as such-- were largely destroyed with the rise of capitalism (though variations persist even now). In this class we will move back and forth between reading literatures from the early modern period when the idea and space of “the common” was a potent site of political struggle in England, and the literatures and debates that draw on fantasies (and attempted enactments) of the “common” now. Texts will include More’s Utopia, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the poetry of Jonson, Marvell, and Milton, as well as works by less familiar figures, such as Isabella Whitney and the Diggers. These early texts will be paired with examples of the discourse of “the Common” that have emerged since the publication of Garrett Hardin’s “The Tragedy of the Commons” in the late 1960s, in sites as diverse as fiction (eg. Octavia Butler, China Mieville), film (Avatar), Web 2.0 tracts, and resistance movements, from food riots in the global South to Occupy Wall Street.
Pre-1900 Course
ETS 494-1 Research Practicum in ETS
Th 3:45-6:30
Instructor: Crystal Bartolovich
This 1-credit course introduces students to the scope and demands of an honors or distinction project in ETS. Enrollment is by invitation to participate in the distinction program, and/or honors program, only. In five formal seminar meetings, we will cover choosing a mentor, developing a suitable topic with engaging research questions, compiling a bibliography, reading critically, and taking notes effectively. In addition to the workshops, you will have individual meetings outside of class with peers, your advisor, and the workshop coordinator to lay a firm foundation for writing your thesis in the spring, when you will enroll in the second part of this workshop, ETS 495.